


all the comrades that e'er i've had

by clarinetta



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Friendship, Gen, Implied Relationship, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Canon, mixture of book and movie canon, not really a happy ending but i tried to give him a bit of closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 13:13:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20408320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarinetta/pseuds/clarinetta
Summary: Richie goes home to LA.





	all the comrades that e'er i've had

_Crouching in the sewer, Ben behind him, Bill in front of him. Crawling through unseen muck on hands and knees, grit sticking to his palms, getting under his ragged nails. The sound of Bill crying in the darkness, of Eddie’s tiny suppressed gasps of pain whenever his arm was jostled. Of Bev trying to keep her voice steady, to hold onto some kind of sanity for everyone’s sake as she lit a match. Ben’s haunted face in the tiny firelight. The awful rip as Bill and Richie came back to their bodies and saw Eddie’s arm disappear down the spider’s throat. More blood than Richie had ever seen before, even more than what had come from the drain in Bev’s bathroom. Eddie’s hand, weak and limp and already cold, touching his cheek for the last time–-_

Richie wakes up crying. The dream dries up fast, but his tears take longer.

\---

Richie leaves Derry without saying goodbye to anyone. He hopes they can forgive him, as they have forgiven his transgressions so many times before. Before heading to the airport, though, he stops at the Kissing Bridge. He thinks he remembers where he carved his R, and he is right; there it is, just a few struts away from the bridge proper, big and loud and audacious, just like he had been. The events of the day before, whatever they were, are already faded beyond retrieval, and Richie feels a horrible sense of relief about it. But this memory is still abundantly clear, for some reason. Maybe because he is standing here, exactly where he had been twenty-seven years before, doing exactly the same thing: waiting for a car to pass out of sight so that he can carve without being seen. The past stapling itself to the present yet again, a piece of paper folded into halves and pressed together.

Twenty-seven years ago he had flicked out his father’s pocket knife. Today he has his own, a slightly thinner blade, cheaper but still suitable for this purpose. He kneels down and braces his left hand against the railing, the force of memory and echo so strong he has to close his eyes for a moment. He remembers how rough and aged the wood railing felt back then, cut nearly to ribbons with layers and layers of lovers’ names and initials and dates. He remembers the inescapable heat of that summer, the humid air so heavy in his lungs. And he remembers what he intended to carve that day, what he worked up the courage to etch into Derry’s directory of lovers, before he had been interrupted by a passerby and chickened out.

He positions his knife next to the R and carves a small vertical line, then crosses it with another small line to make a plus. Then, his hand trembling slightly, he gouges a large E out of the wood. He feels as though he is carving not into wood, but into his own heart. _Please don’t let me forget him again,_ he prays to whatever force pushed them all together in that long-ago summer. But there is no reply.

On the plane home, Richie writes down all of their names.

Bill Denbrough  
Ben Hanscom  
Bev Marsh  
Mike Hanlon  
Stan Uris  
Eddie Kaspbrak

_Please,_ he prays again with his forehead resting against the seat in front of him. _Please. Please let me keep them at least._

But there is that sense of reassurance and relief again when he wakes in LA and realizes he doesn’t remember Stan’s face anymore.

\---

He writes down their names again on a fresh sheet of paper when he gets home. He has to check the first page to remember Ben’s last name.

The next morning he opens the notebook. The first page has faded significantly, the letters bleached and old, still legible but devoid of power, like words written in some long-ago time. He copies the names down anyway; this time he has to check for all but one of their last names. He puts the notebook away and tries to control his shaky breathing, not quite sure why he’s feeling so panicked. What is he forgetting?

The next morning he opens the notebook. The names on the page mean nothing to him, though a faint pang grasps his heart very briefly when he runs his fingers over the old ink. He shrugs and closes the notebook.

A week later he gets a call at work from a man named Mike who seems to know him. He lets it go to voicemail, but something in the man’s accent as he talks makes Richie jolt upward. _Mikey,_ he thinks, and hauls ass to the phone. All of them come back to him, shadowy but still somehow solid: Mike and his eyes with their dark dark circles around them; the flash of Bev’s hair; Bill’s strength and leadership; Ben’s quiet loneliness; Stan’s ordered mind; Eddie’s whistling breaths and his pill bottles.

He and Mike talk for a few minutes. Mike says he thinks it’s happening again, the forgetting. Richie scoffs a little; how could he forget his best friends? Then Mike asks him what Stan’s last name was. Richie pauses and glances over at the notebook on his kitchen counter top. Those must be the names he had been copying down. The names of his best friends. _Why don’t I know this?_ He gets it wrong, and his hands shake with guilt and panic. But Mike is forgetting too, and this fills Richie with that awful deep-down secret relief again. If Mike is forgetting, that means it’s over. Whatever they went back for, whatever they did… It’s finished. Well and truly over. He can let go. They all can, finally.

He tells Mikey he loves him, and it still feels true; even if the memories aren’t there, the love still is.

\---

A year later, Richie books an interview for his podcast. The man is a horror author, which is a little outside his usual round of musician and actor guests, but the guy is a big deal right now; the movie based on his second book, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is the top movie in the country for two weeks running, something of a miracle for a horror movie these days. He is out in LA making the interview rounds and agrees to meet at the studio to record Richie’s program. The name makes no special impression in Richie’s thoughts when he books the interview, but when William Denbrough walks into the studio, a slight man in flannel with thinning hair combed back away from his face, Richie’s heart leaps into his throat for reasons he doesn’t understand. He can’t stop looking at the man, who seems to be having trouble looking away from Richie himself; names are floating into Richie’s head as they stare at each other, names that mean both nothing and everything to him: Ben… Bev… Eds…

Another name jumps out, a name connected somehow with this author standing in front of him, and it flies out of his mouth before he realizes he has spoken. “Stuttering Bill?”

Mr. Denbrough jerks back as though Richie slapped him, and Richie startles backward too. Some flash of recognition cuts across Mr. Denbrough’s face like a cloud finally floating away to reveal the sun behind it. “Trashmouth?” he says, unsure. Richie’s heart hammers like a jackknife. He nods. He feels like he has just woken up from a dream and hasn’t shaken it completely yet, like he’s still in that twilight moment before re-entering full consciousness. Some feeling adjacent to deja vu sweeps through Richie over and over again until his knees are weak with it. He can remember no specific time when he might have met this man, but the sensation of having known him and loved him deeply remains anyway. He feels that there is a barrier blocking something hugely important in his mind and if he could just break through it, he would understand what this man means to him.

“You and me…” Richie doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. _Have we met? Do we know each other? Are you feeling this too? What is this?_

“Hey, you’re…” Mr. Denbrough steps forward and raises a trembling hand, reaching for Richie’s face. It falters before it gets there. Richie reaches up and touches his own cheek; warm tears run over his fingers.

“You too,” Richie croaks, and Mr. Denbrough wipes his own wet face. At that, one image tears through the barrier, and Richie gasps and falls to his knees in an unconscious imitation of the memory: he remembers kneeling next to Bill, a very young Bill, thirteen at the oldest, a Bill whose hands grip a yellow raincoat with the name Georgie Denbrough printed on the tag. He has no idea how he knows what Bill looked like as a thirteen-year-old, but he's as sure as he has ever been about anything. His thirteen-year-old self is kneeling next to Bill and wrapping his arms around the boy, who shakes with sobs. Other arms encircle the two of them, five other pairs of arms, and the embrace is strong and steady. One of those arms is in a cast which reads LOVER; another pair is wrapped in black bracelets. There is so much love and pain in that touch.

This time it is Bill that comes to him, kneels and wraps his arms around Richie, the barely-remembered past and the present overlapping and stapling themselves together one last time. Two more memories surface, much blurrier than the first but still there: seven of them walking in a line down to the Barrens, and a bridge railing with two letters carved into it. Richie sobs aloud without knowing why, holding onto this perfect stranger who is also somehow as well known to Richie as the back of his own hand. He can feel Stuttering Bill shaking too.

After an indeterminate amount of time, they pull back. Richie grips Bill’s shoulders, and Bill’s hands cup Richie’s face. “It’s okay,” Bill says. His voice is still choked with tears but he speaks slowly and as clearly as he can. “It’s okay now, Richie.”

Richie nods. The memories of the others are fading again, faster than before, but the power of the love between them remains. He loves them with a force he can’t understand but doesn’t need to.

One last memory surfaces, no more than an impressionist painting, hazy strokes of dusky color: seven children holding hands in a circle, blood dripping from fingers in bright streaks.

Then it fades and is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> IT has been one of my favourite books for over 12 years now, Richie one of my favourite characters for about as long, and this is the first thing I've ever written for it; although the fingerprints of Stephen's writing are all over my other fics, for better or worse. Some of the descriptions in his book have imprinted themselves so deeply into me it's hard to remember where they came from. I tried not to steal directly from the book, but the image of the past stapling itself to the present is 100% Stephen's, not mine.


End file.
